Month: January 2013

The implementation of a Test Management or Application Life Cycle (ALM) tool should be approached in the same way as any other IT project. These tools, once setup, will touch on, not only the software engineering team, but operations, project management, customer support and many other aspects of the business. Getting the implementation wrong can be a costly exercise. Not only will you fail to see the expected return on investment but ultimately you’ll impact the quality of the products you’re releasing to your customers. And there are countless examples of companies whose reputations have been adversely affected by bad product releases. Fundamentally you need to approach the implementation of a test management or ALM tool as a project. That...

Sharing project artifacts across different projects within a test management tool tends to be difficult. For example, you create a project space within your tool of choice, develop lots of test cases and run them. However, you have another project running concurrently and they want to use the same test cases within a separate project space. Try to use the same test cases or artifacts across different projects and typically you end up copying the artifacts to the other projects. The big problem with this approach is that you then have two instances of the same artifact. Update one in one project and the other is no longer a direct copy. Few tools seem to cater for these scenarios very...

At some point in the test management process you’ll need to re-test fixes that have been made to resolve issues. This re-test process needs to be approached from two angles. Firstly, identifying failed test cases from previous test runs and then re-running those test cases in a subsequent cycle. Secondly, identifying defects that have been resolved and running tests to confirm that those defects have been fixed. Our test management tool, in this case Quality Center, needs to support us in these endeavors. In this video we look at how QC can be used to pull together a test set which includes test cases that have failed in the past. The video also covers how we can identify fixed defects,...

No test team can run every single test case on every single release of a product. So being able to aggregate results from different views or areas in your test management tool is essential when it comes to seeing the whole picture. However, how your test management tool deals with that aggregation might not be quite so simple. This partly depends on how the QA team have set things up and partly on how well the tool you use deals with this. In this video we look at how Quality Center deals with result aggregation. Ultimately we’re looking for accurate reporting that demonstrates the quality of the product at a point in time. The very nature of this aggregation though...

Different test management tools use different terminology for the concept of having a library of reusable test cases. With Quality Center the term used is the test plan. Not quite sure why it’s referred to as the test plan as a test plan is far more than just a repository of reusable testcases you’ve written. I suspect it’s just historical so we’ll let that point go. Anyway, in Quality Center terms the test plan is a library of testcases. Those testcases reside in the test plan area and can be used in sets. Those sets are then executed and the associated testcases executed. So you can see that you have two different instances of the testcase…. 1. The instance that...